Who cares? Paid and unpaid care work
Families are increasingly outsourcing care and nursing activities. For example, care homes and mobile care services are increasingly replacing informal support from relatives. At the same time, women and men are reorganizing the distribution of paid and unpaid work and young children are no longer cared for exclusively by their mothers, but also by daycare centers and increasingly by fathers. Building on the results of the BMBF-funded project “The Social Psychology of Care Work” (duration 01/2012 - 07/2018), this project analyzes the effects of these changes on social inequalities in several thematically and methodologically linked sub-projects. Why is the pay for social services still low despite the high demand for care workers? How can men and women successfully reconcile work and family? What obstacles need to be overcome so that the outsourcing of care and support tasks reduces gender inequalities instead of shifting them from one population group to another? These socially relevant questions are examined in sub-projects that are linked in terms of content and methodology.